I recall the P2P sabotage efforts being pretty feeble. I particularly recall Madonna's record company having an album labled as her most recent album shared on KaZaa that was actually just a bunch of mp3s of her saying "What the fuck do you think you're doing!?". Funny stuff.

Edit: Found a copy of the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA

I remember that! From around 2001-2003, a good chunk of the Top 40 tunes found on file sharing networks would be one verse, looped over and over so the MP3 duration was equal to that of the actual song.

This worked best on mainstream P2P clients like Limewire, Kazaa, Ares (all based on Gnutella I think), because the fake MP3s would propagate more widely.

It didn't work as well (or at all), on relatively obscure, community-based networks like Slsk, where people were more likely to share entire albums, and not just the singles.

Did it? I didn't notice it.

I barely noticed it back in the day too. I had a friend who was into piracy quite a bit more who complained about getting the wrong movie or getting the wrong mp3s.

I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.

Think Kazaa(?) days